Prove It With A Solid Right Hook
by MissFortuneSirPrize
Summary: "Hey, hey. Focus on me, alright?" She positioned herself between her and the window, blocking out the view through the dirty glass, and used both hands to rip through the worn fabric of his pants. *Series of one-shots only, so far*
1. chapter 1

"Hey, hey. Focus on me, alright?" She positioned herself between her and the window, blocking out the view through the dirty glass, and used both hands to rip through the worn fabric of his pants. Silent tears rolled down his face as he sobbed, her fingers pressing around the gash on his thigh where the bone showed through, and she shushed him again. "It's gonna be alright. We've gotten this far, right?" She turned to look through the first aid kit she'd found wedged into the back of a bathroom cabinet, but there was nothing in it that she could use, and she ran her hands through her hair. "We've gotta go, okay? I'll carry you, don't worry." She shoved everything of use she could find into their bags and put one over each shoulder, handing him the gun and the few bullets they had left before she slid her arms under his back and legs and hauled him up. "Ready?" She kicked the door open, uncaring of the noise and what it might attract, and set off walking in the direction she remembered the road being. Her arms and shoulders shook with the strain of all the weight, but she ignored it as best she could and kept walking. There wasn't time to rest, not until they found somewhere else safe, and she kept up a string of meaningless conversation as they went. She could've cried in relief as she emerged from the treeline and saw the road, and the people walking along it who looked at her in surprise and disbelief.

"Oh, thank god." She fell, her knees no longer holding her up after however long she'd walked, and she only just managed to stop herself from collapsing on him and jarring his leg more than the fall already had. "See, what'd I say?" The boy looked up at her, his eyes half closed from pain and fatigue, but his mouth was quirked up into a smile. "We made it." The rest felt like heaven to her aching muscles, but she grit her teeth and stood up to meet the people walking towards her, moving to stand in front of him so he was out of their reach. She wasn't taking anymore chances, not after the claimers. The weapons made her nervous, too many ways that this could go wrong, but she couldn't walk away without trying. Her mouth was dry, she couldn't remember the last time she'd had any of the water in her bag because she'd been saving it all for James, so her voice came out cracked and broken when she started to talk. "I don't want anything, I just need to know if there's any houses around here." She knew that she looked bad, even for the end of the world, with her clothes covered in mud, sweat, and blood that probably wasn't hers but at this point she didn't even know. "Where did you come from?" She pointed behind her, still trying to calm her breathing, "There's a house that way, maybe twenty miles or so. That's where we-" James' scream cuts her off and she whirls around just in time to see him being dragged backwards off the edge of the steep bank, skidding across the dirt to grab him by the hand with one arm and to reach past him with the other. The position means that his face is smashed somewhere into her stomach, but she ignores his teeth biting into her skin from the pain as she jams her knife into the head of the walker that's got him by the leg. Hands reach past her, grabbing James, and she looks up into the face of the man that looks like their leader. "Come with us, we'll get his leg looked at." She wants to refuse, but the bleeding has soaked through his makeshift bandage by now, so she accepts the hand offered to her and pulls herself up off the ground. "What's your name, kid?"

"Billie. He's James."

"He your brother?" She looks across the railway to the man standing at the edge, a crossbow dangling from one hand, and shakes her head. "No." She can see his brain working, trying to rationalise that with the way that both of them look so young, and the woman with them seems to have the same thought. "How old are you two, anyway?" She looks down at James, at the way his face scrunches in pain when he tries to stand up, and remembers the day that she found him. "He's six."

She's resilient in a way that most of the other kids aren't, stubborn and determined and wild in a way that most of the people at the prison stopped being after a taste of safety and a place to rest. "You can relax, kid." She's whipcord tense beside him, the two of them sitting on the edge of the watchtower roof, and he stifles a smirk when she shoots him an unimpressed look. "It's strange, not to have to worry about when I'm going to eat next." She talks like this isn't a new thing, the not eating, like she's been living her whole life that way and it makes something heavy settle into his stomach. He remembers watching them at dinner and seeing the way she deposited most of her food onto the kid's plate, taking the small portion for herself and barely finishing that even though it couldn't have been more than a dozen or so forkfuls. "I mean, it's good. But it won't last forever and then we're back to being screwed again."

"Nothing lasts forever, kid." He doesn't say that he knows she could survive it, even though he wants to. Ever since he'd seen her carrying the kid, emerging from the trees with him in her arms and both full-to-bursting bags on her back, he knew she was a survivor, the kind of person that could take the punches without ever laying down and giving up. What he does say is "Nah, you got this." and nudges her with his elbow. The smile she sends him is small, barely there, but he sees it. He's not surprised to find out she's a hard worker, or that her hands are constantly moving. For a few days, he watches in the distance at the other kids try and get her to join her in whatever they were doing that, but she refuses their advances every time and spends most of her time out in the sun. Somehow, he becomes the one that everyone else appoints as her mentor, he guesses, and he spends a lot of time those first few weeks taping up her hands after she's worked her fingers down to blisters and blood in the gardens, or cutting and hammering scrap pieces of wood together for whatever project Hershel's thought up this time. It's also not surprising that the old man approves of her, not with the way she finishes one task with efficiency and comes back to him to get her next job. "Got any idea what happened to your parents?" He asks it while he's working side by side with her as they use the old rusty saw to cut lengths of repurposed logs to reinforce the fence, and very carefully doesn't look up as his arm works back and forth through the tough wood. "Last I saw, my mother was one of them." She takes the log when the saw breaks through the other side and adds it to the pile they've already got stacked up on the grass, grabbing the next one and taking the saw when he offers it. She's not wearing gloves again, her bare fingers curling around the rough bark to keep the log in place, and her muscles tense and release as she saws. She doesn't say anything else about it, doesn't mention her father, and he doesn't ask again.


	2. chapter 2

"Don't." Her voice echoes through the clearing, resigned and tired even to her own ears, and she stands up as much as she can with a gun jammed into the middle of her back. "I'll do it. Let them go." Something heavy lands on her shoulder, not enough to hurt but weighted enough for her to know that it's there, and the wire pulls at her shirt when it moves away, lifting it up away from her skin. When she looks up, dragging her gaze away from the dirt at her feet, she looks at him over her shoulder before she looks at anyone else. She sweeps her eyes across them all, lingering on each of them before moving to the next one, then turns to face forward again. "You want to cripple us, fine, then I'm it." She grits her teeth at the familiar laughter from somewhere to her left, but turns her head to look at him again. He's still wearing the blanket, wrapped around his shoulders, and she smiles a little. "I volunteer." She looks away from him, then, back to face the front, and doesn't flinch when the weight drags across her back this time, scratching into her skin, or when a hand grabs onto her shoulder too tight and spins her around to face the people that had become her family. "Look at that, there's someone here with some balls." It should hurt, when she goes down to the dirt with the gravel digging into her knees and an ache spreading across the back of her legs from where she'd been hit, but it doesn't. She pushes herself back up, slowly, and ignores the blood flowing down the back of her thighs and soaking into her jeans. "Look at her go."

Another blow sends her back down onto her hands and knees, holding herself up as the world spins around her, and she's aware of yelling voices through the pounding in her head, hauling herself back up so she's kneeling and swaying in her spot. "It's alright." She doesn't know if she's speaking loud or if it's a whisper, it gets everyone's attention either way, but she speaks to him more than the others. "I'm gonna be alright."

"Bill, don't-" She smiles again, coughing through the pain that races up her chest, and it hurts to push herself back up off the ground but she does it anyway because she's not going to go that way. "Promise me you'll let them go." The only answer she gets is another swing, catching her in the back of the head this time, and she doubles over, gasping. "Bill!" She glances up, vision going black at the edges but she still sees the blanket laying closer to her this time and the gun that's pressed into the back of his head, keeping him in place. "I'm alright." That's a blatant lie, she's pretty sure that she's coughing up more blood than anything else at this point, wiping at her face with the back of her hand and smearing it across her face, but it doesn't matter. "Look after-" The words get cut off by another series of coughs and the sound of amused laughter from behind her, footsteps walking towards her and crunching in the dirt.

"She's a tough one, isn't she, boys?" She tenses up when he stands behind her, close enough to feel the toes of his boots nudging into the backs of her legs, but she ignores it as much as she can and looks around at all of them again. Until now, with everything that had happened, she was sure that she wasn't well-liked and they just kept her around because she was useful and had no place to go, even if she had started to think of them as the family she'd never had, and so it's strange to meet their eyes and realise that she had it wrong. "I guess this is goodbye." She doesn't give most of them more than a glance, the corners of her lips turned up into a smile, and locks eyes with Rick, nodding before she coughs and drags her eyes back to him, talking directly to him this time. There's a lot she wants to say, if she had time to talk to them all individually but she doesn't, and her chest hurts like someone's driving a metal spike through it so she ignores everyone else and shakes her head at him when he twitches forward like he's going to try and reach for her. "Thank you." She doesn't need to say what for, he knows what she means. It's a thank you for listening to her when she needed to talk, for staying awake with her when she couldn't sleep, for being there for her the same way she was there for James, once.

Another hit blacks her vision out for a few seconds, she thinks, and when she looks back up his hands are in fists at his sides. "I'll see you later." He doesn't move afterwards, stays in his spot in the dirt and ignores the chaos happening around him even though he knows he should be paying attention. He can't look away from the way her body still lays sprawled across the dirt, curled over the same way that she'd fallen after the last hit, reaching out towards him with her left hand and her eyes open towards the sky, still as dark and empty as they'd been when she was alive. "Come on, we have to go." It seems to take him hours to get his legs working again, to pull himself up off the ground, and he grabs the blanket from the dirt and shakes it out a few times before he lays it down on the ground and shifts her onto it. "You want some help?" He doesn't answer and keeps walking, holding her in his arms when he gets into the back of the car and doesn't say anything else until they get back and he doesn't move for a while, sitting in the back of the truck while they dig a grave for her underneath the tree, and he still hasn't said anything until everyone is gone and the last shovel of dirt has been pressed back down over the top of her. "I'll see you later, kid."


	3. chapter 3

"What's happened?" He glances up from the pot he's stirring, sauce still bubbling inside, and looks at each of them. Tara can't meet his eyes, keeping her gaze locked on the floor, and everyone else looks at him in varying degrees of pity and sadness. "Am I in trouble?"

"What are you talking about?" He gestures to the pots next to him, "I found a packet of pasta in the pantry. I didn't think taking the last few tomatoes from Abraham's residence was a bad thing, I was making something for Bill." Tara makes a strange noise, like a cross between a cough and a hiccup, and he puts the lid back on the pot carefully. "If this isn't about that, what's going on?" There's a tense silence when they all look at each other, and eventually Maggie steps forward. "Eugene, maybe you should sit down." He nods and makes for the table a few feet away, but halfway there he remembers Billie telling him that he didn't have to do what he was told, to stand up for himself more, so he turned back around, "No, I'm not sitting down. Tell me what's going on? Is someone hurt?"

"Eugene, it was Billie."

Throughout his life, Eugene never had a relationship that crossed the lines of family or friendship. When it came to romantic and sexual interactions, he was admittedly inexperienced. In part, he simply wasn't interested, and the other part of himself felt too awkward to put himself those kinds of situations. He'd never even been on a damn date. And he certainly, absolutely, had never been in love until he met Billie.

He moved towards the door, probably quicker than he's ever moved before, and Tara stepped out to block his path. "Eugene, you don't-"

"Move."

She stood her ground, talking over him and insisting that he shouldn't put himself through that. Stand up for yourself. "Tara, move!" He slipped past her and out the door, taking the stairs at a run and down towards where the cars and trucks were still parked, beside the big orange tree that she liked the most. They stopped when they saw him coming, moving to let him past when he got close enough, and then there she was. "Billie, no." He didn't fall to his knees, not quite, but the world seemed to tilt and then his knees were digging through the dirt as he shuffled towards her. "Bill?" Her skin was cold where he touched, along her arms and down to the bracelet still on her wrist with the knife clasp rotated to point outwards, and bloody. "Wake up." He tried to remember the last thing he'd said to her but his mind seemed like it didn't want to cooperate, and blood smeared along his skin as he brushed his fingers down the side of her face. "You said you'd always come back, remember?" He didn't know when he started crying, but his eyes went blurry with tears and he rubbed at his face with the back of his hand, ignoring the blood still there. "Bill, wake up, you promised." How long he sat there, he doesn't remember, but eventually they send Abraham to get him up and walk him back to the truck, then he watches as Tara wanders down and picks up a shovel, joining the group digging through the dirt underneath the tree.

"She volunteered, to save the rest of us." He jumps when Daryl talks, seemingly appearing from thin air, "The last thing she said was to tell us to look after you." If it's meant to he reassuring or just Daryl telling him how it was, he isn't sure. "Don't know why she couldn't have done it herself." He shifts over on the back of the truck, making space for the other man to sit down.

"Because that's just who she is. She would have given anything if it meant everyone else was safe." Did give everything, but he doesn't say that. "She wouldn't have forgiven herself for letting anything else happen." The two of them sit in silence for a while, the seconds stretching like hours.

"If I'd known what she was going to do-"

"I know." There was a reason they were so similar, ready to do anything to keep the people they loved safe.

"She loved you." He knows that too, and laughs a little, but it's a broken and bitter sound. "I loved her, too."

The only problem is that's the first time he's ever said so out loud.


End file.
